


Dragging Down a Monolith

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, M/M, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-24
Updated: 2014-07-24
Packaged: 2018-02-10 05:18:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2012430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the way they end.</p><p>(Or, a portrait of grief, painted in five tragedies which befell the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragging Down a Monolith

**Author's Note:**

> Bellatrix escapes Azkaban a bit earlier here than she does in canon; also, the house-elf’s name is taken from _The Tale of Peter Rabbit_ , which you are never, ever too old to read. ♥

I.

Four months after her wedding, under the scythe moon with Saturn turning retrograde in a blank black patch of Shropshire sky she is still learning to read, Andromeda knows she is pregnant.

“You’re going to be a father,” she tells Ted, and then listens to him drop half the dinner plates they own onto the faded, yellowing tile of their farmhouse kitchen floor as she turns her back to clear the table of the food she didn’t make. It’s an odd, old place, the sort people are always talking about fixing up when they’ve got the money, the time, dimmed mellow at the edges and just slightly crooked if you look at it in the right light; they still haven’t gotten around to scraping the peeling plaster walls, or doing anything about the leaky upstairs bathroom, or arranging the sparse furniture into the shape of something adult and respectable the way she was taught, but then, most of the cultural education imparted by her mother doesn’t apply to any realm of reality. Mostly, they are still living out of boxes scattered along the floorboards, the detritus of their lives stacked up in cardboard and battered leather trunks, and she feels very young. She feels like a child.

Ted waves his wand and fixes the plates; he doesn’t even try to fix the new crack in the thick beige ceramic. It’ll just blend in better with the rest. “Did you—you took the test? Already? My God, I mean, _already_?”

“What test?”

“Oh,” he sighs, his whole body sagging loose with relief. “I’ll just—we can go down to the village tonight, and we—er—you can buy one,” he says, patting his chest rapidly with one hand and bracing himself on the counter with the other, peering up at her warily, exhaustedly. His eyes are so dark you can’t tell the iris from the pupil, rich as burnished cherry wood. She hopes, idly, that the baby gets them; she’s never known anyone else with eyes that color. “Merlin’s _arsehole_ , Andromeda, warn a bloke.”

“I forget what dainty daisies men are, you know I wasn’t raised among the things,” she says mildly, wiping off the table. Her breathing seems to come deeper to her now, as if her body is shifting, accommodating itself to the insistent presence of another. “ _What_ test, Ted?”

“The—you _know_ ,” he insists, gesturing in a way that tells her she definitely doesn’t. “I—maybe it’s just a Muggle thing. I don’t know, don’t you have something, something a little more _concrete_? How the hell can you just know?”

The thing about Andromeda—she’s got magic in the thick red trickle of blood running wild inside her, embedded in the marrow of her bones like a second pulse. Ted does too, of course, just like every witch and every wizard, but he doesn’t know it like she does, doesn’t feel the way it rubs against her skin and sparks like ball lightning, how she can just peel back whole veils of spells and feel them, actually _feel_ their ancient syllables clamoring for purpose on her fingertips, on her tongue, braiding in hot-cold inky-slick veins up her arms and down her throat and prickling at her ears in empty rooms. The Blacks are Wizarding nobility for more than the thirteenth-century silver or the jackknife cheekbones, and Andromeda, with her hostile blue eyes, with her quick mouth and her graceless new name, is a Black to her back teeth, even disowned, even disgraced.

Which is a very long-winded way of simply saying that Andromeda _knows_. She knows there is something swelling to life inside her, and Ted knows it because she knows it, but what he really wants is for her to give him something more solid, more clinical than this gentle hum buzzing in her womb, new and soft as a dandelion. As if there could be anything more real, anything more palpable than the certainty of herself and the sudden shock of another heart beginning to beat on its own within her, but that’s too close to _intuition_ for his liking, dirty word, and so around eight o’clock this evening Andromeda Tonks holes up in the leaky upstairs bathroom and does what no Black has ever done before: she pisses on a plastic stick. For love, or something.

Perched on the sink, biding her five minutes, Andromeda’s mind tips back into the winter, to white and blue and lacy cold, the dark cathedral with its pews stacked up like chopping blocks, the Mother of the Seven Sorrows wreathed in a bright burst of cut glass just for her as she walked alone down the aisle, her single lonely, secret guest. All of his family and none of her own, except Uncle Alphard and Sirius, nearly thirteen and obstinate, recalcitrant as myth; the boy is a disownment waiting to happen, and she would know, so she can at least tell him about this if no one else. But he will be the only one, the last in all her family to share anything with her, and it stings her all at once, the bite of loss, that he is the only one of them she has left to love now, no sisters to exult with her in joy, in what only they could understand. She is twenty years old, orphaned too late to forget the warm curl of intimacy that stitched them all together.

When she picks it up and sees the thin blue line blaring louder than any neon declaration in a tawdry back-alley shop, she opens the door and imagines she is going to Narcissa, to Bella, to feel their arms around her, wrapped safe and warm in the cocoon of their voices, whispering and plotting and spinning their dreams between them, the island of one another, just the way it used to be.

“You’re going to be a father,” she repeats to Ted in the same precise, acerbic tone she used after dinner, wearing her smallest smile.

She knows what her sisters would have said; she knows what Ted is saying, too, even though she doesn’t hear it.

—

The house is tucked away in Islington, a three-story Victorian Gothic with floor-length windows and storm-grey siding like something plucked right out of an Edward Gorey drawing, just to the left of unsettling in its immaculate angles and wine-dark roses. It’s raining when she Apparates on a Wednesday morning in August, her belly six months swollen beneath her breasts and her fingers stained magenta with the pomegranates she calls her craving; it’s too hot for a cloak and she didn’t think to take her umbrella, so she lets the rain darken her hair and melt into the cotton of her dress at the back of her neck, cold and sweet as homecoming.

She told Ted she was going to Shrewsbury to shop and he believed her, pressed a closed-mouth kiss to her lips and slid his hand over her belly on his way out the door, oblivious still to certain bright shifts of light in her eyes. Probably she should feel bad for it, but mostly she feels free, unshackled, loosed from the rattling of the plaster walls and the creaking floorboards and the stale fecundity of the land ripe for harvest, Ted always at her heels, _Do you need anything, do you need anything, do you need anything_.

And she waits for the guilt to prick at her skin for that too, but it doesn’t swim to the surface when she summons it. Not on the walk with her heels clicking against the concrete and her heart in her mouth; not at the lonely bellow of her knuckles knocking against the double mahogany doors, her whole body gone still like breath caught in her throat.

Pale, faint footsteps. A heartbeat in her chest, a heartbeat in her womb.

But when the door opens, it is not her mother’s face.

“You trespass,” croaks the house-elf, old Mopsy with her ragged bones and drooping eyes, venom in the brittle clutch of her fingers. Mopsy makes the best Christmas pudding in England; she taught Andromeda to darn socks, once, gave her chamomile and honey for her sick, sleepless nights. “Filth has come to tread on Mistress’ goodwill, you will be gone, you will be gone from here!”

“Please! Mopsy, it’s just me, just—I don’t want to see Mother, only—”

“Won’t! You won’t, you won’t, if Mistress knew—”

“No, no, please,” she says, _pleads_ , she who has never had to beg for anything in her life whispering like a nutter to a house-elf on her mother’s doorstep. There’s a joke here, she knows it, but her mind is too frantic to appreciate it; inside her, the baby kicks. “I just want to see Bella and Narcissa. Please, Mopsy, that’s all, I swear, I just want to see my sisters, only for a moment. That’s all.”

Mopsy makes a sound Andromeda has never heard her make, a growling thing, a painful thing, her fingernails digging into the wood. She looks so old, wearing her own skin like a threadbare winter coat. “Don’t have any sisters here, you don’t, you don’t, you _don’t_.”

“What is this? Who’s here?”

Her mother always smells like springtime evenings, London evenings, oranges and carnations with their sharp honey-bite twining through the air. Andromeda smells her before she sees her like she always has, catches her scent before she hears the door creak open farther in a gust of oak hardwood and furniture polish, and here she is: her mother, the most monstrous, most mythological creature she has ever known, her eyes that are Andromeda’s eyes honed to bluntness, her lips that are Narcissa’s lips, her arms that spent years pushing her off to a governess’ room where children learn the fine and delicate art of shutting their mouths and conjugating French verbs until they’re fit to sit at the dinner table with actual people. She is wearing emerald earrings today, green as the last blade of grass clinging to summer in the frigid folds of winter. There is a new grey peppering the blonde hair pinned off to the side; it fits her well.

She wonders if her mother ever feared not being able to love her own daughters. If she was afraid of shattering something so fragile, so valuable, so beautiful.

“I want to see Bella and Narcissa,” she says, her mouth moving before she knows what she’s saying. Her voice, at least, does not shake; the rest of her body tenses, hardening like a chrysalis so the bones hold together. “Please, Mother. Just this once.”

“You have no mother,” she says, hardly a whisper between her teeth. She doesn’t even blink. “You _dare_ blacken my doorstep with your—”

“I swear it,” she rasps louder, “just let me see my sisters, please, I’ll never bother you again. Never, never, just, please let me talk to them, I. That’s all I want, that’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

“And you think they want _you_?” Her mother’s eyes rake over her, dragging heavy and slow over her face, her neck, down to where she has pressed her hands protectively over her belly; they catch there, and Andromeda feels a sudden violence course through her at the thought of loving her baby, sheltering it within her, fighting for this thing she coaxed to life inside her. “You think they want to see what a,” she shows her teeth, “what a worthless little wretch you are? You think they want to see how you sully their blood while you roll in your filth? How you abandoned them for your disgusting _animal_ of a—”

“Let me see my sisters,” she growls louder still, to drown out both her mother and the ringing in her own ears, “let me—”

“I have two daughters. As far as they care, you are dead. They should wish it for you.”

“Let me see them. Let me see Bella and Narcissa.”

“It is preferable,” her mother continues over her, nostrils flaring, her lips powder-pale and bloodless, “to what you have done to yourself. You are my greatest shame, you are a stain upon my womb. You’ll never understand what it does to me to even look at you.”

It’s like an opening inside her, welling up with blood. Andromeda grabs the iron railing and shows her teeth.

“Did you fucking rehearse that, you miserable old _bint_ , my God, I hate you, I _hate_ you,” she’s grinding out, half-moon marks clawed on her palms where the nails are digging in, shaking with repressed fury, the baby churning with her through it all. “You’re shit, you know that? You’re _shit_ and you don’t know anything, you don’t understand anything and you never have, and I hope you fucking choke, I’ll pray for it before bed every night, and I didn’t rehearse that but it got the damn point right across better than you, now didn’t it, Mother? Didn’t it? I never did ask, did you even have to change your last name when you married Father? Is that what this is about? Is that why you’re so fucked in the head?”

“ _Hold your tongue_ , you stupid girl, I will—”

“Fuck you,” she spits, gulping down air. Her breaths come sharp and shallow, like tiny, stabbing knives. Her whole body is taut, held tight with a brittle, swollen rage. “As if I wanted to see _you_ , you disgusting _fuck_. Not my mother, you’re not _anyone’s_ mother, you don’t know how to be.”

“And neither will you,” her mother hisses, animal, livid-low, her eyes flying wide. “Beggars and traitors choose the ditches they lie in. Now go rot in yours before I see to it that you do, trash.”

The door clicks shut; Andromeda does not look back, not when the curtains of the highest bedroom peek open in a whisper, not when a rose thorn catches her wrist down the walk and turns the skin there redder than a broken heart.

—

On a bench in Finsbury Square, a stranger wearing a cloak that looks like it’s been sewn from various multicolored sheep sits beside her while she’s letting the steady drizzle smear her eyeliner into wet black puddles under her eyes, busy cracking open another pomegranate husk and looking, she is sure, like a soaked, raving madwoman. Andromeda does not acknowledge the intrusion into her private bubble of daftness; just peels the white around the seeds and lets it drop to the ground, wet and useless, hollowed out. Look well, stranger: here is the daughter of no one, plucking fuchsia kernels from her mushy pomegranate on a park bench while her mind turns to marshmallow fluff. It runs in the family. Ask anyone.

“Do you know what I think, dear?” the stranger—an old woman, she sees now—asks her, eyes fixed on the pigeons. Her voice is like the flicker of a candle; Andromeda has to strain to hear.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” she answers. It’s a silly question, she thinks, because who can ever really knows someone else’s mind, and she’s not deluded enough to pretend anyone understands her. Soon even her baby will part from her, breathe its own air, drift, become a stranger to her, she who cannot mold herself to fit the world. Maybe this woman is the same; maybe they are both trapped here together. She considers offering her some pomegranate, but she’s not sure it would do wonders for her image as a functioning person right now.

“I think these birds are getting right complacent, that’s what,” says the old woman. “Eat, tweet, sleep. For all they know I could put them in a pie, right here, right now!”

Andromeda laughs, and so does the old woman, a high, metallic shard of a thing unsuited to her voice. Disconcerting. “I suppose so.”

“And you know what else I think? I think creeping vines need time to grow.”

One greedy swallow after another, the baby appeased inside her, a miniature, hungry god. “Do they.”

“Oh yes, which is why it’s fortunate they’re so tenacious, my dear,” says the old woman, who should not speak so clearly for someone so very toothless. “Would you like to know the last thing I think? The best things come in threes, you know, and it seems I’m full of them today.”

“Go on, then. Let’s have it.”

“I think you should give your girl the best, the prettiest, the brightest, the most utterly impractical name you can think up in your lovely little head. I think you should give her a good head start.”

Andromeda chews, swallows. Breathes. “And where does that ever get any of us? Did it do you any good?”

“Oh, dear, I don’t have a name,” the woman tells her, “at least, none I’ll speak. It’s a secret, you know! Don’t want these birds to hear. But you love your daughter, you see, like you’ve never loved anything in all your life, not even your husband or your first waking breath of air in the mornings. And she’ll feel the same about you. That’s why it’s important. Because you’re special, you and she, and you’re going to do this thing right.”

She thinks of her own mother, her own sisters with their crisp, rubied names, thinks of her own, Andromeda on the rocks waiting for the hero to bear down upon the sea and carry her away. Perseus stole all the blood and glory, but she still got the galaxy, didn’t she? Her mother probably only thought of the syllables, the way it would underline her proud chin on the family tree, the languid vowels. An-dro-me-da. Andromeda, the second-born, the forgotten, the dagger-tongued, the resigned, lonely beauty. How they loathe her now, breaker of her own chains. Andromeda, inevitable, stronger than the tongues that gave her shape and form.

“And what if that’s not enough?”

The old woman flashes her a rainy smile, pink with gums and the wet tip of her tongue. “It’s never enough, as you well know, but why weigh her down with that the moment she draws breath? By the time she can walk and talk she’ll have enough grief of her own, you’ll see. You know that.” She pulls a pocket watch with fourteen hands out of her sleeve, and if there’s one thing Andromeda learned from that house, it’s the gleam of old gold when she sees it. It shines in the mist like ancient things, like blood spilled. “Name her something with bird wings in it. Something with violets and milkweed.”

Andromeda turns suddenly to ask how she knows it’s a girl, but the woman is already gone; she pops another handful of pomegranate kernels into her mouth instead and runs her fingers over the gentle swell of her belly, staining her dress a bold, incriminating magenta.

—

After the thrashing, after the cursing and the crying and the pain, after the speechless midwife pushes her daughter into her arms for the first time, Andromeda laughs and laughs while Ted blinks, open-mouthed, at the wet pink hair plastered to her tiny head, pomegranate-bright, her hands reaching already for Andromeda, little nine-month-old fruit, all hers.

“Nymphadora,” says Andromeda, still hurting with it but breathless with the beauty of her daughter, her own baby girl, her wrinkly skin, her bunched-up fists, both of them so bound up together and in love. She traces the baby-fat folds in her uncertain arms, feeling the miracle of her lungs expanding with the first breaths she takes on her own, nestled there against her breast, warm pink bundle of her flesh and blood and bone. “Nymphadora,” she whispers, just for them, soft as a secret, as a promise.

 

 

II.

Want to know a secret? A tender, unadulterated, great big honking secret as poorly kept as what Marlene McKinnon and Dorcas Meadowes were doing behind Greenhouse Three last Halloween?

All funerals are the same. Every single one. Big or small, saint or sinner, lapsed Catholic or devout heathen, they all smell like dusty floorboards and wilting lilies and cheap candles; if you’re unlucky, they might also carry the faint whiff of formaldehyde, but that’s usually only at Muggleborn funerals where the sickly, lingering incense of fair weather faith is even more pungent. Overused platitude this, pick your cliché that, blah blah such a great man, have some coffee you miserable fuck, what a loss, mumble something whatever, and there’s Mother Mary with her hands spread over the carnage, none of the pleasure and all of the pain, poor old bird.

There you go, there’s your secret, your very own witticism courtesy of Sirius Black, who hates funerals, hates his family, hates himself, a little, and is not nearly as drunk as his Uncle Alphard would have insisted he be after the event of his death. What the hell kind of seventeen-year-old boy (seventeen-year-old _man_ now, in the eyes of Wizarding England) knows how to write a eulogy? And who the hell wants to sit in a stiff suit all day and hear some priest talk about God, that far-off, emotionally distant brain surgeon in the sky whose name you only invoke if you’ve got a tumor the size of a potato or you’re in such deep shit you’re not getting out with a few well-placed kicks to delicate bits and colorful curse inventions?

He’s holding up well at any rate, which means he’s only had a little vodka and he hasn’t set anything on fire yet; James and Peter listened when he told them he was fine, yes, he’s fine, go to bed, I’ll be up soon, and James only threw him one Concerned Brotherly Look before he climbed the stairs and shut the dormitory door behind him. He doesn’t know whether he wants to follow or go pick a fight or drink until he has to crawl up the stairs; mostly, he doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t know how he’s supposed to grow up and deal with this when no one’s ever taken care of him and he barely knows how to take care of himself now, seventeen and all wrung out. Anything that can make him wish he was five years old and had someone to tell him what to do means the situation is spiraling quickly into the realm of cataclysmic. He considers changing into Padfoot and cutting his teeth on the newly upholstered chair in the corner.

“You know, it _is_ late. And you were up earlier than you’ve probably been up ever.”

He lifts his head from the arm of the couch to look at Remus, sitting at the other end with a book in his lap and his cheek resting on his fist, unsmiling, untiring even for the darkness beneath his eyes; he would probably sit there all night if Sirius asked him to and make vague noises every half hour about how he ought to go to bed, for his health, or his sanity, or whatever. Sirius is suddenly glad for the onset of Christmas holidays, that he doesn’t have to deal with anyone but Remus right now when his own head is loud and crowded enough, and when Remus can coax him out of it so well, sometimes.

“Shows what _you_ know,” he says, pushing one foot into Remus’ lap, “I had to get up before you’d even turned over in your bed, wanton slag that you are, to get those dungbombs in Snapey’s underwear drawer last year. Little ooze-cake was waving it about under his robes for a week.”

“I still get all twitchy when someone mentions stray Bludgers,” says Remus. He stands up, book tucked under his arm, and takes a step toward the other end of the couch a few feet away. His jumper has been stitched with mismatched thread in a couple places and Sirius wants, absurdly, to touch them, feel the spindly sutures under his fingers; his own mother just bought them new clothes whenever they tore or started to fray. No loose ends in the House of Black, no tiny holes to fill. Just pretend they’re not there and buy a new set of robes. “Sirius,” he says.

“Oh, _oh_ , it’s the prefect voice, you _tart_ , you know what that stodgy reprobation does to me. Tell me again how I’m unreasonable and obtuse. Call me an ill-bred bastard.”

“I’m just over my monthly curse, you know,” he says, but there’s no laugh in his mouth. “I’m not in the mood.”

“No, you never are. There’s just no love left, Moony, none at all, and what am I supposed to do about this wandering eye, I ask you,” he sighs, shaking his head, just for effect and all. “Expect the divorce papers by owl sometime next week, though it breaks my heart, light of my life, fire of all things above and below my belt, the latter of which are shriveling up and receding into my body as we speak.”

“Sirius.”

“I’m _fine_ , honestly, just,” he says, sitting up and smoothing his hands down his knees. “I’m fine.” I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine, my head is not going to burst like an overstuffed ravioli. Say it enough and it stops meaning anything at all.

Remus offers his hand; Sirius takes it and stands in front of him, an inch or so taller, paler, softer. What Sirius would really like is for Remus to sit him back down and wrap his arms around him and just hold him there so he could press his face into the crook of his neck, his patched-up blue jumper, smell his soap and his hair and taste the velvet of his pulse and not have to say anything or be anything or do anything. He would like to sink to the bottom of Remus Lupin, Prefect, Ronsard-Reader, Aspiring Prune Juice-Drinker. He would like Remus to breathe for him, for just a while.

And maybe Remus even wants to, but he won’t, too unsure of himself, too unsure of Sirius, and that hurts and confuses and chafes in ways Sirius tries very hard to ignore, and can’t.

“I’m fine,” he says, again. “I’m fucking _fine_.”

“No,” says Remus, very carefully, “you’re not.” He licks his lips and goes tense at the jaw and shoulders, shifting a little, suddenly awkward, off-balance, like he wants something he doesn’t know how to ask for; he meets Sirius’ eyes all the same and for a change doesn’t focus on the illicit pixie threesomes that apparently go on somewhere over Sirius’ shoulder _all the time_ , but never when he turns to see what Remus is looking at that isn’t him. “We’re all here, you know. I’m always here. If you need me.”

“Yeah, and you know what, I’m sure Prongs is going to come stomping down here any moment demanding to join in the emotional plum pudding,” says Sirius, rubbing his eyes. Remus blinks at him. “Let’s just go to bed. And, I—thanks, mate. You’re. You know.”

“I know,” says Remus. He doesn’t quite meet Sirius’ eyes; it’s nothing new, but it _is_ , and he hates it. He hates it.

It’s not until he’s in bed that Sirius really processes what Remus said to him. He drags his nails through his hair and considers picking up quilting or joining a cult or maybe taking up a religion, or starting one.

—

The trouble with adulthood is that it’s a little like the Hogwarts Express. You get on, you _want_ to get on, and you sit down with your friends and have yourself some pumpkin pasties or gorge yourself on chocolate and it’s all fun and games until the lights go out and it just keeps going faster, faster, faster, and you realize you’ve got no idea where you’re going, it’s too late to switch tracks, people keep using words like _prospective_ and _liability_ and _spiffing_ , there’s no control, no recourse, and, surprise, there were never any brakes on this thing at all. Watch out for that brick wall—oh, wait, you can’t.

Sirius knows this emphatically, absolutely. And not just because Remus Lupin told him so, either.

Since part of being an adult means brushing your teeth and making it through breakfast without vomiting, he does just that, three days before Christmas, and sits in his Uncle Alphard’s house to sift through the sediment of someone else’s life. The valuable things are meant to be sold, which just goes to show you that adults don’t actually understand the worth of anything, running late for the nine-to-five Ministry job with all their priorities stuffed clumsily into the bottom of their bags. This antique bone china, the French busts of Medusa and Dionysus? Cheap and meaningless. He’d give them away if he could.

In a box in a bedroom closet, he finds Christmas decorations, all the ones Sirius made himself half a lifetime ago kept well and preserved with gentle spells and wax paper. In a drawer, there is every birthday card he’d ever sent the old man. On the walls, on the mantel, there are pictures of him: five years old in starched green robes; nine, hugging Regulus; thirteen and grinning in a Gryffindor-red scarf; sixteen, under the old oak tree, hair in his eyes, a lazy smile, a book in his lap. The clouds smudge together in the background, cover up the sun.

There are a couple hairs on the pillowcase in his bedroom. A chipped coffee mug sitting on the counter, never washed. Laundry to do. An unfinished book. Unfulfilled grocery lists.

Sirius stands in the middle of the bedroom he used during the summers when he was younger and stares down at the box of old ornaments on the bed. If he’s lucky, maybe he can blink and five hours will pass and he can go back to the dormitory and sleep for twelve years. His whole body aches like history, like the dusty bookshelves and the silver picture frames housing all the different boys he’s been, like everything that’s been done to him and everything he’s lived enough to regret, seventeen years reverberating in his skin.

“Ah,” says Remus, coming to stand beside him and push a cup of tea into his hands, “the avant-garde years. If you squint that one looks a little like James after he’s had too much cheesecake.”

“It’s a fish, you daft werewolf,” he says, but he’s smiling anyway. The tea is cool enough that it doesn’t scald his tongue, heavy with cream and sugar; James and Peter left a while ago for Christmas shopping and the annual game of Muggle For A Day, no doubt making huge asses of themselves this very moment, but Sirius didn’t want to go when they tried to push him out the door, and Remus, who either didn’t want to witness it for the seventh year in a row or just knows Sirius like a weathervane by now, stayed behind with him.

He’d like to think it’s that second one. He’d like to hope he’s not in this alone.

Remus picks up one of the finer works of Sirius’ surrealist phase and holds it up the sunlight, eyebrows arched high. “If that’s a fish, what’s this one? A rhinoceros with goiter? Your first impression of Snape’s nose? Slughorn looks less disturbing in his tartan.”

“It’s an _angel_ , honestly Moony, this is just embarrassing. Get some damn culture, man.”

“I’ve got lots of culture. I’ve got culture coming out my delicate lupine ears, I’ll have you know. By the time I’m forty I’ll have scratched a whole Picasso onto my own thigh and they’ll put me in a gallery in Toulouse.”

Sometimes, when Remus does this—strays into the back-alleys of disparagement and self-deprecation just to make someone else feel better—Sirius really wants to grab his shoulders and shake him silly for being such a stupid swotty tosser. Right now, though, he just wants to curl around him and sleep forever, because how is he supposed to do any of this on his own, how is he supposed to pick up his marbles and grow up without Remus Lupin’s stupid jumpers and his tea and his barmy poets and his awkward angles pressed always into his side like ballast, like affirmation.

He can’t. He can’t do it, which is a.) horrifying, b.) kind of pleasant in that warm and vaguely queasy belly-thrill sort of way, and c.) suggests a whole lot of things about the way his mouth goes dry when Remus’ hair falls into his eyes, or how he gets excited when there’s shepherd’s pie for dinner because he gets to see Remus get excited that there’s shepherd’s pie for dinner and there’s nothing at all better than an excited bit of Remus Lupin, nothing. Or how Remus’ smiles stick to his ribs all day, especially when he puts them there. The way every inch of his body galvanizes and sparks when he puzzles out another piece of the Map. His fondness, in general, for occupying space with Remus Lupin.

It suggests a whole lot of things; Sirius swallows them down and pushes them into his chest, safe from prying eyes and most of all safe from himself.

“ _France_. You plonker,” he snorts. Remus’ fingers weave between each other through the handle of his mug; they’re very long. “You just want them to whisk you away so they can feed you crêpes stuffed with those slimy strawberries and you can finally turn into the Rimbaud-reading sea sponge you’ve wanted to be since they handed you that prefect badge.”

“I do like crêpes,” Remus agrees. “Would they give me blackberry, too?”

“Not if they ever want you to be productive again.”

“I’m more productive before breakfast than you are all week,” he says. Sirius stares. “Excluding the small hours between ten p.m. and four a.m. on Fridays, or any time you’ve got an idea. A bad idea. They’re all bad ideas,” he amends.

“Last April, kitchens, just after midnight. A whole lot of golden syrup and your face full of red velvet cake, if I recall, and I _do_.”

Remus wavers. It’s a small thing, nearly imperceptible, just a slight pinch of the mouth and a shift of the brow, but Sirius is nothing if not fluent in the many moral upheavals of Remus J. Lupin where it concerns good cake and good reasons for being terribly, terribly illegal. “You know how I get around red velvet cake and you did it anyway, you stupid berk. I was lied to.”

“Oh, I do know how you get,” Sirius leers. His arms and legs, suddenly, feel a little easier to move again. “You’re a humongous slag. I could ask you to do a tango naked in the Great Hall and you’d just roll over and do it for a bit of cake. It’s _indecent_.”

“The French wouldn’t treat me like this,” Remus sniffs, summoning all the mock indignation he can muster in the face of frosting-scented shame.

“That’s just because they haven’t seen you in your orange sweater vest doing things no respectable prefect has ever done in the Hogwarts kitchen. I, however, have, and I know exactly what a sick man you are, Remus Lupin.”

“Ten points from Gryffindor for besmirching my honor,” says Remus, hiding something away in the curve of his teacup tipping toward his lips. “No, no, don’t have a fit. I’ll spare you a thought or two when I’m gorging myself on wine and blackberry crêpes and that runny cheese you hate. ‘Yes,’ I’ll think, ‘this reminds me so much of something a dear friend of mine said once. I wonder how he’s doing these days, what with the motorbike and the criminal record and the puppies. Well, here’s to you, Sirius Black,’ I’ll say, and have myself some more crêpe.”

“Immature little wanker,” he growls, without malice. “And what are you going to do about your wobbly French, I ask you? I’ve heard your dulcet conjugation, Lupin, they won’t even piss on your feet over there.”

Remus sets his tea on the desk and smiles at him, his softest smile, the one that can be teased to teeth, to full, warm laughter shaking his exhausted bones. “Well, d’you know, Mr. Black, that’s why I reckon I’ve got to take my friend Padfoot with me, as he knows all the really fun words anyway. And I just don’t have the same je ne sais pas with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth.” The sun is in his eyes; they’re flecked with gold the way Sirius loves.

Something about the way their voices thread together in this house. Something about loss and wanting and never quite having. Something about Remus’ empty hands, and his empty hands.

That’s a lie. He knows why he does it.

Sirius kisses him. It’s soft, quiet, over very quickly; Remus tastes like Earl Grey and honey, smells like Ivory soap and thick-knit jumper. His lips are warm.

“Are you all right,” says Remus, who does not pull back, does not look away from his eyes. He takes both of Sirius’ hands in his, solid like certainty, and tugs him a little closer.

Their foreheads press together when he leans in, his hair in Remus’ hair where it’s tangled, pushing into their eyes. He could say, _No, I’m not all right, but I can be_ , or, _Please don’t let go of me_ , or, _I love you so much I don’t think I could even button my fucking trousers without you right now_. Any of those things would be true, but he thinks Remus might already know them all, so he just whispers, “Yes.”

“Good,” breathes Remus, and then he swallows, looking suddenly a little pink, chewing at his lower lip. “I have no idea,” he says, only vaguely bubbling on frantic somewhere beneath the sweet intone of his voice, “I have _no idea_ what I’m doing, I mean, not even—none at all.”

“It’s all right,” says Sirius, and he’s laughing, and Remus is laughing, and their lips are so close they brush when he speaks. It’s warm and easy and a little bit stubbly, ticklish. It’s the best thing he’s ever had. “Neither do I.”

The walls hold. The train pulls into the station for a stopover. He kisses Remus Lupin, and he does it again.

It’s all right.

—

Want to know another secret?

It’s not the getting there that will kill you.

It’s what you do—and what you don’t do—with that fire burning in your gut.

 

 

III.

They never do find Regulus’ body.

The best they can do is a sun-singed, matted lock of hair turned up in the dirt near the lake, which his mother keeps in a glass case beside her bed. After his father dies, she speaks to it, sometimes, when she wakes up gnawing on old bones in the middle of the night. He was her little boy, her only son, her only real son; he was her last, and with him goes all their hope and all their splendor, all their majesty, all their ancient empire, this man who would have been a king, who was a son of kings, too vast to confine to a single tapestry, too grand even for the legacy history has written them. She whispers; she moans.

Andromeda, when she finds out, spends the night outside watching her stars. She teaches her daughter his name, and nothing more.

“What’s the moon tonight, baby girl?” she asks.

“New moon,” says Nymphadora, five years old and brighter than any star and any galaxy, love of her life, bite-sized wonder. She pops a strawberry into her mouth. “Liar’s moon,” she says. Andromeda kisses the top of her pink head and holds her to her breast, tucks her under her chin.

Sirius mourns him in the way he doesn’t mourn him. He does it in the way he doesn’t take out the few photographs he has left, in the way he doesn’t touch the newspaper even for the crossword, in the way he smokes a whole pack in a single day. At home, he folds what is probably a month’s worth of laundry and eats leftover soup and listens to the clock tick on the mantel, just sitting on the couch waiting for nothing all evening. When Remus gets home, they drink, and they don’t talk about it, and Sirius pulls him into the bedroom and fucks him, hard and urgent; they don’t talk about it, not when Remus wraps himself around him like a slim, dark-eyed prayer afterwards, not when he feels like his arms might fall out of their sockets if Remus lets go, not when they both lie awake until morning. Not saying anything is better than starting and stuttering and saying nothing at all.

Bellatrix doesn’t go to the funeral; Narcissa, who knows exactly how he died but not why, keeps her veil over her eyes the whole time and does not speak to anyone.

And when his name is etched into the marble of the family mausoleum, when his death is recorded and he is well and truly diminished on his own cold slab of rock, they do it still, these people who never quite saw him, never quite knew him: his mother, who hated Sirius more than she ever loved Regulus; his father, silent, unseeing; Bellatrix, who loathed nothing like she loathed a man who harbored doubt in his heart; Narcissa, who thought mostly of a quiet, pallid boy who could never burn as brilliantly as his namesake, not even in death.

They do it still.

But if they had known him, if they had thought to look in the River Avon outside Fordingbridge on a particular night in June, they would have seen him just before he sank to the bottom and melted into the pebbles and the sedge, his arms splayed out in welcome, as if waiting for someone to find him, just this once. His skin moon-bright and nearly translucent, holding water; his eyes dimmed to grey slate, half-shut.

And when they saw the back of his head with the wide strip of skin and hair missing, when they felt the water that filled his swollen lungs, perhaps they would have known him then, the man who had the courage to brand himself a traitor. But they couldn’t have, and that’s the worst part. No one ever really knew Regulus Black. Regulus Black didn’t even know himself.

Who knows what he thought as he tried to slake the mindless thirst screaming in his throat, how it must have hurt worse than being dragged across the shore and under, if he thought of anything at all but swallowing and swallowing, mouthful after mouthful, even as the water choked him to nothing. Perhaps he thought of his mother, her doting, her pride, the lavish promises she made; perhaps he thought of her disappointment, her precious rage, the way she would sometimes turn her head when he walked into a room, admonition for yet another failure so small he could not even recall the shape of his own transgression.

Or, perhaps it was the kind cousin: beautiful, reticent Andromeda, always with a lonely word for him even though he was so much younger, always inclusive, almost conspiratorial at times. Maybe he thought of her, who he had not seen in years, with her new family he would never meet. Maybe he was sorry for that. Maybe he wasn’t.

Possibly, it was the older brother. Sirius, who was brilliant and handsome and kind and in love, who even in dishonor had everything Regulus never did, who he had not spoken to for more than three years, who used to write him from Hogwarts while Regulus was still at home, who sometimes sought him out in the halls that first year even after he was sorted into Slytherin and knew to keep away from blood-traitor filth degrading themselves and their names. In those last few moments, sinking, sinking, perhaps what Regulus wanted was to be seven years old again and playing chess in Sirius’ room, eating chocolate his brother had pilfered from somewhere just for him. Maybe he just wanted to start all over from the beginning; probably, he did.

It’s easy to imagine that his last sad gasp was for the house-elf. Kreacher, who knew him and loved him no matter who Regulus really was; Kreacher, who was his oldest, his best, his only, friend.

It’s easy to imagine, too, that it felt like relief.

But they never do find him, none of them do. Regulus Black sinks to the bottom of the world, his eyes still open and waiting, wanting, his hands stretched out for the sun, whether in petition or accusation, even he couldn’t say.

 

 

IV.

The _Daily Prophet_ fairly screams these days, lies stacked up neatly into bold headline boxes and stories full of fiction better than any fairy tale or five-Knut bodice-ripper running two pages or sometimes more. Tonks stopped reading it months ago.

In the line at Gringotts, a woman’s face sneers back at her from the newsstand in the corner. A woman with her mother’s eyebrows and mouth, a woman with her mother’s nose. She looks away.

“Someone’s got to kill this one as soon as they find her,” a man is muttering nearby. “Don’t send her back to fucking Azkaban, just goddamn do it right this time. Fucking idiots. Fucking Ministry. _If_ she got out, like there was ever any question. _If_ they kill her, they won’t have to worry next time someone cocks it up, now will they.”

Behind the counter, a woman with gold earrings and a scarf in her blonde hair smiles at her; Tonks smiles back.

She is twenty-two years old. She does not think in ifs.

—

At her parents’ house, in the only album her mother took (stole) from her childhood home in London, there are pictures of the three Black sisters: Andromeda, her small, secret smile, her violent blue eyes; Narcissa, with her blonde hair hanging down her back like a shroud; and Bellatrix, the oldest, standing beside her mother, her dark, wild stare, her hair-trigger beauty, all of them like something carved from sheer granite, unmoving and unbowed. It is difficult to imagine them separate, shattered. Three threads split from the same spool.

Bellatrix—Bella, her mother called her—is still beautiful, even after Azkaban, which must also run in the family; Sirius may shrink from his own reflection, his own raw bones, but he still looks good. She told him so a few weeks ago and he looked at her like she’d just asked if she could go upstairs to snog Buckbeak for a bit, and then he said he’d rather wear his ugliness. He’d been drinking again. She didn’t think he meant it.

Still. It’s good to know she’ll age well, even in a festering pit at the end of the world. She supposes.

Her aunt doesn’t look too much like Sirius, but she has the exact cheekbones her mother does, the full lips, the haughty, aristocratic lift of the chin. Some Auror, some Order member, will eventually kill her. Her aunt. Tonks has never had to do that before.

Her mum doesn’t talk about the family much, but Tonks knows she still loves her sisters in that cloying way you cannot help loving people even for trying to drown them out; for seventeen years, they were her life and her love until suddenly they weren’t, and she’s never learned how to stop missing them, how to stop prickling at the ghost sensations of the things she once had even after those things were taken away. Family above all, my blood is your blood, my heart beats for your heart, until the moment you taste of some sweet forbidden fruit and you are cast out of your only home like the traitor you are, your name crushed to dust, all your love shredded up like it was never there at all. It might as well be printed on the fucking coat of arms.

After Sirius was sent to Azkaban, her mother spent months haunting the halls of their farmhouse in a silent daze, forgetting to eat, waking in the middle of the night and sitting outside under the stars, even as the cold crept up through the earth and the trees. Tonks turned eight late that year; she would go out the kitchen door in her purple pajamas and lie beside her, fall asleep wrapped up in her mother and their quilt, the smell of honeysuckle, the smell of old cotton. When it rained, they sat in the old shed with the aluminum roof and let the muffled metal clink-clink-clink sing them to sleep.

He had been the last of her family—the last, at least, to still love her, and maybe the only one of them who could ever understand her. Her mother has never had many friends; it’s part of what she likes about their dead-end nowhere-house in Shropshire, closed away safely from the world at the end of its lane, all the pain shut out down the hill with the stream and the blank expanse of the muddy field beneath keeping vigil to her solitude. Just her and her husband and her daughter, a few sheep and a garden, all the shelter and sustenance they need, their own continent folded into a few forgotten acres. In retrospect, Tonks thinks it’s probably why she used to get on so well with Remus Lupin.

And now it just keeps happening. Sirius is free, and she begged to see him, begged her own daughter to see him, but Dumbledore Said No, and if you listen closely you can even hear the capital letters falling from that living shibboleth’s lips, _No, Andromeda, it’s best this way_ , you know how it goes. Bella is out now, in all her cold, fathomless horror, and someone is going to take her away again. They are going to have to kill her mother’s sister to make it stop. Again.

If they find out how much she hopes she will not be the one to do it, she’ll probably be out of a job. Maybe even out of the Order.

“You are, what is the word—oh no, no, do not tell me,” says Fleur, taking off her snowy shoes at the door and unwinding the scarf from her neck, “you are _ruminating_. Yes. That is it, I think.” She drops a kiss to the corner of Tonks’ mouth and goes to put on tea, which she mostly does for the novelty than out of any great fondness for Earl Grey. Very English, she says. Such a pastiche, très mignon. She drinks three cups a day. Tonks thinks it’s wonderful. “Tell me about your day. What is it you are having your ruminatings about, hmm? Out with it.”

“Out with it. Just listen to you, you’ll be a regular yobbo before long. When I first met you I don’t think you knew the difference between a tea kettle and a chamber pot from St. Mungo’s.”

“That is because you English have no sense of aesthetics,” says Fleur, very cheerfully. “Your tea kettles look like chamber pots and your breakfasts taste like cheesecloth, yes? I suffer, but I survive.”

They’re getting good at this, the routine of being in love. Toast and tea and mixed-up laundry, two breathing bodies pressed together on her bed. Good mornings and good nights. Her shoes and Fleur’s shoes standing side-by-side at the door. A shower that runs out of hot water far too quickly, unless they’re sharing, of course, for conservation purposes. Shared cigarettes. Shared breath. They talk about buying a house in Dorset, sometimes.

A war on, and Tonks is in love. It would just be her luck.

“You still have not told me,” says Fleur, sliding a cup of tea onto the coffee table for her and bumping her knee into Tonks’ knee when she sits down, blowing on her tea. She smells like rosewater. “So. Tell me.”

“It’s really not anything, I mean, it’s just—Mum stopped by this afternoon. That’s all.”

Fleur nods, only once. A single word, one look is all it takes sometimes, and Fleur knows how to mine it like it’s gold sitting right out in the open. Maybe it’s a French thing. Maybe it’s just a _them_ thing. Either way, she always knows. “We will go see her for Sunday lunch,” she says, squeezing Tonks’ thigh. “We will. Nymphadora,” she says, turns her name over in her mouth like it’s her native tongue, the throaty consonants spun to honey on her lips. Tonks leans into her, tea cradled in her hands.

“God, don’t you start. She hears you saying my name and she’ll finally just haul off and adopt you like she wants, and then won’t _that_ be fun to explain at Order reunions ten years from now.” She turns her head to rub her nose in Fleur’s neck, soft and safe and warm. No newsprint monsters here. No phantoms hanging from the rafters of her mother’s house. “Actually, given the family history, maybe we’d just be carrying on the grand old tradition. No one would bat an eye.”

“You have a _beautiful_ name. Fool. You should use it.” She snorts; Tonks feels it through her nose, her mouth, sighs when Fleur runs her fingers through the pink ends of her hair and tugs at it a bit. “When we have children I want your mother to name them all. Elle est un génie. I will tell her at lunch, yes.”

“I do hope you’ve got another flat to live in. It’s awfully cold out there, and I’d hate to throw you out into the harsh English winter, all flimsy and French as you are, but there’s nothing for it. Maybe Sirius will take you in. You two can just exist together near Molly and give her an ulcer.”

“Ulcers do not work that way. You have a poor grasp of _everything_. I am telling your mother.”

“Molly’ll blame you for it anyway,” Tonks laughs.

“She will have, what you say, tea and sympathy for me when I tell her about you. Horrible, horrible woman, you are.” Her eyes are full of light over the top of her mug; it’s Tonks’ favorite look on her, all over playful hauteur. There’s a tiny blue fluff in her hair left there from her scarf.

“Well, you know. If you learn to grovel a little like proper English lass, I _might_ be persuaded to take you back,” she says, brushing Fleur’s hair off her shoulder, just for emphasis and all. “It’d be a hard sell, though, with all your wrong opinions and what have you. I’m going to need tears, bosom-beating, lengthy odes to my finer bits. Are you taking notes? I’d take notes if I were you.”

Fleur pushes her against the arm of the couch and hovers over her with arms that are, as Tonks has come to learn many, many times, nothing short of ultra-refined, willowy woman-steel. It’s kind of amazing. It’s even more amazing how much she loves it, the spindly strength of her, the angles her elbows make, which is such an utterly, irrevocably ridiculous thing to think that it can only mean she loves Fleur with the hopeless, shameless, mildly nauseating abandon of the truly daft. “And what have you got without me, eh? Cabinet full of English breakfast and bad underwear. You _need_ me.”

“Oh, I suppose I do,” she whispers, and catches her lips, lets her tongue inside.

“You are ridiculous,” Fleur murmurs, smiling against her wet mouth. “Fundamentally ridiculous. I love you.” Tonks closes her eyes, and breathes. Just breathes. There are no ifs here, not for them; there is only now.

They cocoon themselves inside their London flat like they do most nights. They make soupe au pistou for dinner and drink cheap white zinfandel out of oversized cocoa mugs. They watch an old film on Tonks’ Muggle television, and she looks at Fleur’s big feet and her bony ankles sticking out on the cushion beside her and falls a little in love with them, which probably means she’s in some serious trouble where Fleur Delacour, French Goddess in the English Wilderness is concerned. Tonks gets her to say “Wotcher” just to see her nose crinkle while she does it. She’s pretty sure that wrinkle at the bridge of her nose could stop traffic.

They blow out the candles in the sitting room, they shut the bedroom door, and then there is nothing but her body and Fleur’s body, nothing but lips and teeth and breath. They slot together like glass tumblers, wake up just long enough to do it again, Fleur’s mouth at her neck, her hand moving between her legs and then her lips and her tongue driving her hips up off the bed, all the tension strung tight inside her until it breaks, orgasm racing and melting hot through her entire body. She can taste herself on Fleur’s tongue. She can taste both of them.

And they sleep like nighttime waves in the middle of a war. They miss every shuddering blast.

—

What she remembers afterwards is mostly flashes of light. Green, red, white-hot shocks behind the eyes.

There’s the Death Eater, barely older than she is; there’s Bellatrix, so much larger, so much more terrifying than any photo could ever convey; and there’s only the span of a heartbeat to decide. By the time her heart stutters, stops, and beats again, she’s killed the younger one and Bellatrix is gone, and Tonks then knows well the danger of inventing a humanity for a monster: they don’t stop being a monster just because they breathe the same air you breathe or because they have your mother’s nose. The haze comes and crowds inside her mind; she covers her mouth with the back of her hand and fights the nausea all the way back to Grimmauld Place. She doesn’t even feel Remus’ hand on her arm at the door.

Sirius tries to get her to sit down and stay, but she won’t, bile clawing at her throat, jelly-legged and freezing, and how she manages to get home without splinching herself six ways to Sunday will be a source of controversy and occasional fights full of inventive French curses for years to come; for now, as she steps through the door and Fleur takes in her face the color of old ash, the dull brown peppering the roots of her hair, as her whole being shifts almost tangibly, Tonks just grabs onto her arms and tries very hard to keep herself standing.

Tries, but Fleur Delacour wraps an arm around her waist and carries her most of the way to the bathroom, even though she won’t tell her so.

“Nothing felt real, I mean, oh my _God_ ,” she says, her teeth chattering, the hard tile digging into her knees. Fleur brushes her hair back with both hands as she kneels over the toilet, her heart in her throat and her stomach somewhere down by her knees, but nothing comes. “It was—this is just, it’s _real_ , you know, it’s actually happening. This is it. This is fucking it. Fleur.”

“ _Hush_ , hush,” Fleur is saying, over and over, her arms around her shoulders, her mouth in her hair, rocking her back and forth. Tonks has never been good at going to pieces, so it’s a good thing Fleur has taken inventory of all her parts and knows just where they fit in a pinch. “Hush, Nymphadora, Nymphadora, I have you. Ma moitié. I have you.”

She doesn’t know how long they stay that way. It might be ten minutes; it might be two hours. When the world begins to slot back into place, Fleur pulls back long enough to peel off her coat and shoes and then folds her up again, pressing her head to her breasts, stroking her hair. She wishes she could be sick, or cry, or scream, or _anything_ , but she only shivers like a child on the bathroom floor.

“I am going to call your mother over,” says Fleur, very softly. Tonks nods into her shirt and swallows; what she wants to do is close her eyes and chant that old, familiar prayer of a woman who lives on a battlefield: Don’t go, don’t ever leave me, please don’t leave me here alone. Promise me, no matter how bad it gets. Promise. “Only a minute. I will be right back, I will be right here. I will.” She kisses Tonks’ forehead, hard, right between the eyes, a fierce, young thing. They are so young. They are both of them so young.

It really only does take a minute before she hears the crack-and-hiss of Apparition, which means her mother, in the span of about thirty seconds, has already had enough time for her own private crisis to wrack her bones and resolve itself in the smooth cut of her jaw. She doesn’t cry when Fleur shows her into the bathroom, which isn’t too surprising. Tonks has never actually seen her mother cry, but she’s never seen that tightness bundled up high in her throat, either.

“Well,” says her mother, kneeling with her beside the bathtub, “what’s the news of the world, baby girl?”

“Mummy,” her voice breaks, just, “Mummy.”

Maybe it’s a reflex, some primal response to the stark horror of the wide open world that we fit so easily back into our mothers’ arms as if we never left them, they who grew us for nine long months inside their own bodies, they who kept us safe and kept us nurtured, they who cultivated our beating hearts, who knew no agony and knew no joy like we gave them. Tonks is eight years old again on a cold November night, starlight and half-moons and their very own constellations blazing to life at trace of their fingertips, her mother’s greatest comfort, her greatest love, and she her own. Honeysuckle, old cotton. Flecks of snow flitting in with the rain.

“She’s a monster,” mumbles Tonks. Her mother’s chest swells and deflates, out of time with her own.

“I know.”

“None of this felt real,” she says, “just, I’m sorry, Christ, Mum, I’m so _sorry_.”

“Don’t you say that to me,” says her mother, stern-soft in her ear and pressing her closer, “don’t you say that to me, Nymphadora. You’re all that matters. Just you.”

Someone else has Apparated into the flat; it sounds like Moody, asking questions, pushing for answers, voice trampling down her ears like a rock slide. Fleur has that wobbly pitch to her own clipped words that means she really wants to shout at him but won’t because it’s not the decorous thing to do right now, all fifty-seven kilos of her bearing down quietly on a veritable human mountain. Tonks loves her so much it seizes her up like a vice. She must look mad, right now. Mad and pathetic and miserable on her bathroom floor. Another year and who knows, who knows whether she’ll even be able to hold herself upright. Who knows where either one of them will be, what they will be, _if_ they will be. If, if, like a chill in the bones.

Her mother’s hand tangles in her hair, balm against bloodied thoughts. Tonks stares at the buttons on her dress, pilled up and puffy with the purple fabric, the kind she used to poke at when she was little and her mum would pick her up and carry her over the hill in the summer to find the blackberry patches, or sit her on the kitchen counter so she could tell her stories while she cooked. “You know,” says her mother, “before I had you, I bought about half a dozen baby books. Thought they’d spell it out for me.”

She snorts. Tonks cannot imagine her mother poring over baby names and the benefits of cloth diapers and organic carrot mush. She cannot imagine her mother ever being less than certain of herself, a river gouging its own path alone, utterly in love with her and ready always to guard the borders of their life with all the blood there is inside her. “What for?”

“Because I was afraid,” she says. “I was young and I was afraid I’d just be pants at it. But then you were born, and you taught me better.” She shifts so that Tonks is pillowed up against her shoulder, at the gentle slope of her neck, graceful as a ballerina’s. Her hair is falling out of its low chignon, tickling her nose when she leans down and nuzzles into Tonks’ hair, right at her temple, inhaling slowly. “Someone told me once that mothers know their babies by smell. I thought it was just shit. Sentimental rubbish they feed you with your broccoli and leafy greens.”

“What do I smell like?” asks Tonks, a little wetly, a little breathlessly.

“Apples. Good, fresh red apples. The October apples, the really fleshy ones.” Her mother takes her face in her hands, turning it up to her own, the eyes that are her eyes even when they are not, the hands that are her hands no matter the shape they take, her blood that is her own blood, always, always. “I could sniff you out halfway across the continent, Nymphadora Tonks. I would know you at the end of the world,” she says, thumbing her cheekbones, swallowing. “You’re my baby girl. You’ll always be my baby girl, and you know damn well who that is. So don’t you dare start thinking otherwise.”

The snow melts on the bathroom window; Tonks sinks into the stillness of herself and her mother, into the certainty of breathing, into the sound of her own heart opening and closing, opening and closing, opening and closing.

—

 _If_ becomes afternoon tea, a bad dream, insidious as pocket lint or creases in her robes, but her hair is still pink. Her hair is still pink, and they never do stop talking about that house in Dorset.

 

 

V.

There’s one more secret you ought to know:

You don’t really have to worry about slamming into that wall. You’ll live.

You don’t have to worry, because the pace is so rhythmic, so calm, you’ve settled in so well here in this little life you’ve carved out for yourself that you never expect the explosion when it comes. And why would you, because aren’t things going to get better, isn’t it going to work out this time, aren’t you going to do this right, haven’t you hurt for it, haven’t you given your penance, hasn’t the universe fucked you over enough already. Don’t you deserve it. Don’t you want it.

On an August evening in 1996, Remus reaches for two teacups, and his mind snags.

—

At night, when the house slips into its iron hush, he works on the slim sheets of parchment for the editing job he’s been allowed, three Galleons every other week to keep him in bread and ink and discount soup. He pores over every word and every incorrect bit of punctuation until his candle flickers out into the dim flesh of the dark, and the next day he folds them up and sends them back in just as soon as they’re finished, waits patiently for the next. He does this so meticulously because it is allowed him, and there is very little Remus Lupin is allowed.

If he’s forgotten to eat, he will sometimes open one of the cupboards and forage a single slice of bread or scoop up a spoonful of peanut butter and eat it straight out of the jar and pretend it tastes like something. Fleur makes sandwiches and leek soup, buys peaches and leaves them out on the dining room table. She never mentions them, never asks why he hasn’t eaten them. Just throws them out, shriveled and bruised. Dead.

She comes with Tonks when they can, and sometimes she will sit up with him and talk in her low, rueful way, bright nightbird in the two a.m. kitchen light; she doesn’t offer him endless strings of I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-so-so-sorry like some of the others do, but neither will she feed his misery, pays no mind to the fleeting ghosts behind his eyes. They bring him cigarettes and good tea, and sometimes Tonks squeezes his hand, touches an elbow, a shoulder, hugs him close, and he will remember her when she was small, when her mother used to bring her by the flat on weekends as twenty-six years’ worth of memories bite at his throat, blur, and fade to dust. He loves them both, with what brittle life there is left inside him.

There was even Andromeda, who came for him a few weeks ago, smuggled in by way of her daughter entirely without Dumbledore’s knowledge. It was the first time he had seen her in a decade. _You’ve gone more grey than I have_ , she’d said, and then, _Remus, Remus Lupin, oh my God_ , and shattered in the entryway. He held her for hours. They said almost nothing.

Most nights he falls asleep in his chair over a piece of parchment, or on the couch, and wakes up in the dark to navigate his way to bed. The hallways seem long and foreign; his own body feels slower, out of proportion. Hands splayed at impossible angles. Knees that bulge out, a red slash for a mouth. When he walks up the stairs, he puts one foot after another slowly, quietly, as if the floor might give way beneath him, cut him from below, but it never does. Be thankful for small mercies, Remus Lupin, except—well, they are always so small.

If he were allowed anything, he thinks he would ask for Harry. He would beg for him, because Remus loves him, has loved him all his life, because he is full up with it, full of love he never got the chance to spend, like a river overflowing, voracious with it, livid with it, sick with it. But he can’t. He can’t, and he knows he can’t, and so they will both have to suffer alone.

In Kent, the crooked old house his mother left him stands still, cobwebbed between the trees at the end of the lane like a distant memory waiting for him to sift back into its impoverished, dusty-warm seclusion. He does not know if he is actually allowed to be here. He is probably supposed to fold himself away into his thin slip of a corner and give his answers when he is called upon like a good soldier, but no one has told him what to do yet.

No one has told him what to do, so he haunts this house with the silent grace of a shadow and picks his way through the days, just waiting. Waiting, waiting. He tells himself there’s a reason for it. It’ll pay off, someday.

Every night, when he lies down on his side of their bed, he thinks, I am going to wake up in the morning and Sirius will be here. It happened once already, didn’t it, didn’t it. He came back. His fingers will be cold and his hair will be in his eyes, and he will be just as solid and just as real as anything alive could ever be, and he’ll say, Moony, I’m sorry, Remus, oh God, I’m so sorry. I love you. I’m never going to leave you alone. I’m never going to leave you alone again. I’m not going anywhere. I love you. I love you.

It didn’t happen this morning, either.

—

“What a fool.”

Remus is sitting on the second to last stair where he has been for hours, watching the smoke from his cigarette weave a cross-stitch pattern on the ceiling. Walburga Black’s portrait might be talking about him. She might be talking about Sirius. Remus just says, “Yes.”

“He was a judgment on me,” she half-moans, and Remus can hear the simpering self-pity in her voice, the pureblood rancor. She bites like a knife. “Shame of my flesh, waste of my blood and bone. Better that he had died in the gutter where he belonged. Better that he never drew breath at all.”

Remus snubs his cigarette out on the hardwood, blackening another hole in the oak. There are fourteen of them now. “I love him,” he says. He’s not talking to her or even to himself and his hollow mouth, his hollow, empty stomach; mostly he is speaking for the sake of the present, he thinks, so he doesn’t get it confused the way he’s so afraid he will, the way he’s seen men and women do before. He loves Sirius Black. He loves him now with his empty hands, loves him two years ago, loves him at seventeen in the common room in the middle of the night. Loves him on the station at twelve years old. Loves him choked out on the North Sea, loves him ragged and road-weary and alone. He will love him if he ever comes back; he will love him if he never does. Say _loved_ , push it into the past like it was something you used to do a long time ago, and it feels burnt-out. It feels like dying. It feels like a different sort of loss, numb at the core, greater and more permanent than absence. “I love him,” says Remus.

“Half-breed _filth_ ,” she hisses, “you think I don’t know about the abomination he carried on with you. Your tainted blood, your very wretched existence. Would that my curse of a son had been rounded up with you like he should have been, right at the start.”

“Your _son_ , he wasn’t your son, you miserable shit, he wasn’t your fucking _anything_. He was never yours.”

“Oh, but you think he was _yours_?” she whispers, soft as a lie. “You know what you were for him, idiot boy? Another broken little piece for his collection. Blood traitor, inhuman waste, you know how he liked to play with them, werewolf. _Werewolf_. His very own.”

Remus knows, as well as he has ever known anything worth knowing, that Sirius loved him. After that night in the Shrieking Shack, it was the first thing he ever said to him, standing in his doorway under the jagged-white shock of the half moon with Remus so afraid everything would be different and afraid it would be the same, _I love you_ , like green things growing in a bomb site, like saying hello, like starting all over raw and new. Said it on his bed, Remus’ legs around his waist, his mouth and his hands on every scar he missed, moving inside him, _I love you, I love you, I love you_. Eighteen at breakfast, in their first flat, newspaper crinkled in his hands, Remus’ mouth full of toast and jam. _I love you, you know that? There’s strawberry all over your mouth. Daft plonker. I love you._

By the time he’s done, his hands are chafed from the handle of the rusty gardening shovel and there’s drywall and plaster all over the floor, down the stairs, on his clothes, he’s breathed it in and he doesn’t give a damn. The hole runs nearly the length of the wall, narrow pipes and blue-white flickers of old magic showing through inside like something rotten, the last of the house a dead echo at his feet, his mouth dry, and why didn’t he do this months ago, why wasn’t this the first thing they ever did? Silence screaming hollow in his ears. Sirius had been happier living in a cave eating rats. Why didn’t he do this a year ago.

In their bedroom, he throws open the curtains and lies down with the window open to the drowned-out London stars, presses himself into Sirius’ side of the bed, still smells his hair on the pillow, the old wet bark softness of his skin. Outside, a stray cat or some other scavenger rustles for food or for warmth in the alley, and Remus listens to it, hopes for it. Good for you. Take whatever you can get. Take it and run and don’t ever let go. There is no shame in living like thieves when the world has already sucked you dry.

If he closes his eyes he can almost feel Sirius here under the red quilt, the harsh jut of his hipbones, his feet on Remus’ ankles, and he can pretend they are both going to live through this, that he isn’t afraid of living through this, that they will have everything they were supposed to have all along. Because there has to be a give and take to this. There has to be, because he has spent every last scrap of his generosity and where has it ever gotten him. Where has it always gotten him.

The winter they were twenty and Remus was out of work again, Sirius asked him why he was never angrier, bitter, why he didn’t try to fight the world. _No one would blame you_ , he’d said. _God fucking knows you’ve got more reason to be than most. It isn’t fair. It isn’t._

 _Because I’m a lazy werewolf and it’s one in the morning and you’ve got your hands in my pants_ , said Remus, on the edge of the bed. Sirius knelt between his legs, grabbed his belt loops, looked up at him with his thumbs running over his hipbones. _I just—it’s not the world, you know. Mostly it’s people, and people are just people and they can’t help that but I like most of them anyway. You know?_

 _Way to rage against the dying of the light, Remus_ , said Sirius, and there was a look in his eyes Remus couldn’t place, hot and fierce and sad, and all he thought was that he loved him. He loved him so much, and that was all the truth and all the justice he needed. _Want me to give them rabies? I’d love to give them rabies for you,_ he said, and took him in his hand, watched his face for the tip of the head, the hiss of breath, just for him.

 _No_ , he said, hand on Sirius’ jaw, _I just want you. That’s all, God, that’s all_ , he breathed, thrusting into Sirius’ grip, and then groaning at the hot slide of his mouth over his cock, the whole world just them, him and Sirius Black and their skin, and whatever they could build between them.

He never told Sirius what he really meant was that he cultivated kindness within himself to hoard like a hungry animal stowing away food for the winter, so that he would have enough when the time came, because the time always comes. That it was because he had enough of his own agony to ever want to inflict it himself. That it was because it kept him in warmth, in goodness and pieces of hope to take out and hold onto in the dark, if nothing else. And there is often nothing else.

It is the only currency he’s ever had enough of to barter, and it’s bought him happy memories, loaned him back what he lost for two years and then took it away before he could even fathom a future without it again. But you can’t eat happy memories. You can’t live on should have beens. Remus curls up tight on the bed and listens to the still black shiver humming through the house, ringing dull, fading out.

A sudden late-summer breeze shifts the curtains, shifts his hair on his forehead; there is nothing else, here.

From outside the streetlight shreds through the window, illuminates the quill and parchment on the desk, Sirius’ shoes, his jacket still draped over the chair, the book he never finished, pours his absence into Remus’ arthritic bones like the hot white acid-flood just before the moon waxes full. Empty chairs and empty beds and aching joints, every morning and every night; and when he wakes he will plant his feet on the ground and somehow his lungs will swell with life, and his muscles will move him through the house and through his duty, and his heart will keep beating because that is all it knows how to do. He will live. Even now, buried in the heavy, mummified husk of the night, he will live, even as his heart beats inside him like mockery, I-am, I-am, I-am, I-still-am, he knows he will go on living; even as he closes his fist on Sirius’ pillow and searches for him there, listening for the shift of bedsprings, listening for the breathing that will never come, he will go on living. He will go on living, this starving ghost who waits for nothing and dreams of things he does not remember, who clings to yesterday when there is only ever tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.


End file.
